Business

Memoir App Aims to Give Everyone a Perfect Memory

The Launchpad is a series that introduces Mashable readers to compelling startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Lee Hoffman knows he's not normal. "Incredibly bizarre" would be a better description, he says.

For the past five years, Hoffman has carefully tracked every emotion, every activity, every thought and even every food item that goes into his body. He started collecting these records during an "emotionally volatile" time in his life — about which he would only say he was "dating a girl" and juggling "a lot of different things" — with the goal of getting a better sense of how different events affected his well-being. In the process, he found a certain thrill from being able to relive every moment later.

"I have very, very detailed records," Hoffman, a serial entrepreneur, told Mashable in a recent interview. "I have thousands of notes on my iPhone."

Normal people probably don't have such detailed records of every single thought, emotion or meal, but Hoffman thinks he can change that. On Wednesday, Hoffman and his cofounder Angela Kim unveiled a new app for iPhone and OXS called Memoir, which promises to help users relive their memories in similar detail without having to go through the crazy amount of effort that he did.

Memoir syncs and stores photos from your phone and computer in the cloud, organizes them by date and then pulls in data from social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare to provide more social context. The app uses the time stamp and geolocation data to determine if a Foursquare check-in should be grouped together with an Instagram photo or a picture from your phone's camera roll. Likewise, it analyzes data about those you're connected to on social networks to determine if they were part of a particular moment, even if you never tagged them, and makes it easy to search for moments you shared.

"What you will end up with is one single memory," Hoffman says. "People don't think about things in terms of Instagram photos and check-ins; they think of something as, 'I was at this place and this is what I saw.'"

In essence, the app combines the anniversary reminders of Timehop with the photo organization of newer apps like Viewfinder and the feel of social diary apps like Momento, but with more data analysis and less sharing — it's private by default.

Hoffman describes Memoir as big data for personal memories. "We are making sense of whats going on to play it back to you and fill in the pieces," he says.

Hoffman started his career working at Razorfish studios in the early 2000s and went on to launch several consumer and B2B startups, the most recent being Veri, an educational tool, which was part of Techstars in 2011. While pushing Veri, he and Kim started developing what would become Memoir as a side project. Eventually, one of their investors urged them to give up on Veri and commit full-time to Memoir.

Memoir has since raised $1.2 million from Betaworks, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures and others. The New York startup has four full-time employees and a couple part-time employees.

In the short term, the startup plans to incorporate data from more social networks and possibly develop apps for Android and Google Glass, among other platforms. The long-term goal, according to Hoffman, is to give everyone who uses the app a "perfect memory."

"Basically every thing that your memory does, we can do if we have enough data being captured," he says, noting that new technologies like Glass will allow users to record more than ever before, which will make it possible for apps like this give you better recall than ever before. "You're sitting there 15 years down the road with your kid asking what the first date with mom was like, [and you can say] 'Let me show you.'"

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.